On Sun, 26 Jan 2003, Jack Seay wrote:
> http://hyperworlds.org
There's a list of "Xanadu(like)" projects there, but I'm a little
surprised that Wikipedia ( http://www.wikipedia.org/ ) isn't on the list.
WikiWikis surely have some principles that are very importantly similar to
Xanadu's. Wikipedia, at 100,000 encyclopedia articles, the best example
yet of an open, publicly editable, collaborative project to build
knowledge. Each page has its own permanent revision history, and one can
easily compare versions: changes are highlighted. There is a "what links
here" feature for each page, offering a sort of two-way linking feature.
Transclusions have been discussed and I think implemented on at least one
version of wiki (but not Wikipedia). On Wikipedia's software, document
"annotating" can be done by anyone via accompanying namespaces.
I know full well that Wikipedia has significant differences from Xanadu,
and I wouldn't want to be appear to be so rude and ignorant as to suggest
that those diffferences are unimportant; but isn't it interesting, anyway,
that something *this* close to Xanadu is out there, and particularly not
in a vaporware stage but actually in very, very heavy use and growing by
hundreds of articles per day?
Note: Wikipedia was recently Slashdotted and so might be very slow.
Larry Sanger
Wikipedia co-founder